Re: Certifications: Not worth the paper they are printed on?

[David Howe <DaveHowe.Pentest () googlemail com>]

Terry Cutler wrote:
> Totally agree with you Jon, That's why I like the Linux exams that
> Novell has called Practicums. The entire exam is based on you VNC'd
> into 2 or more VMWARE boxes and are presented with a list of tasks to
> complete. Each task is WEIGHTED, so if you mess up early in the
> objectives, it can snowball into the rest of the exam and cause you to
> fail.

I quite liked the practicums, although some of the tasks were
unrealistic (Although I would love to see DnsSec adopted, its still a
white elephant).

The problem there becomes chicken and egg though - if you need practical
experience to pass the exam, and you need to be hired and working in the
industry to gain practical experience, how does a potential new hire
gain sufficient experience to be hired into a job where he could get
sufficient experience?

> Exams like this are the only way to test real world knowledge. Only
> downfall is that these exams are quite tough, and it discourages a lot
> of folks from trying it.

I found the CLP easy, as all the tasks were real-world ones (i.e. one an
experienced admin would have done). I found the CLE tasks harder as they
involved skills that were rarely if ever used in a real world
environment. Moreover, the official novell training courses for CLP/CLE
concentrate just on what is going to be tested on - so you don't get a
sufficiently wide range of skills (in my opinion of course) and are very
suse specific (so you use yast a lot, which isn't a bad thing for speed,
but means the skills are less transferable to other distributions)

YMMV of course :)

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